During a year-long investigation, Huawei executives were unable or unwilling to reveal enough about how the company is managed to reassure investigators it didn’t serve as a mechanism for Chinese intelligence agencies as well as an IT provider, according to Michael Hayden, retired four-star U.S. Army general and former head of both the NSA and CIA.

The Australian government has also restricted Huawei based on security concerns, as has the U.K., following a report from Parliament that found Huawei’s governance and operational methods to be either too opaque or too suspicious to allow it to operate freely.

Huawei has not, however, done anything to deserve all the suspicion and controversy, according to Li, who insisted the company focuses only on “packet in, packet out” and does not participate in either politics or espionage.

Huawei was an easy target for suspicion in the U.K. because it was selling telecom gear to British Telecom and is headquartered in a country with an adversarial relationship with the West.

Allegations that U.S.-based security and networking companies had been pressured to build backdoors into their products that would allow the NSA or CIA to eavesdrop on foreign countries show that Huawei isn’t the only IT provider to fall under suspicion, Li said, adding that every government has rules about security and counter-intelligence and every company operating in those countries has to cooperate to a certain extent.

But the security risk isn’t in the networking pipes that transport packets, it’s in the datacenters that hold them, he told The Register: “Yes, data are passing through the Huawei equipment from a network perspective… packet in, packet out. But it doesn’t store the data. We do develop the products to enable carriers to operate the network… most of the intelligence in the data center is where the data is stored.”

Equipment that can carry digital traffic can also be used to copy, block, or modify it, however.

The traffic that was diverted was from thousands of sources, but U.S. government .gov and .mil servers were heavily represented, including those from all four U.S. military services, NASA, and the office of the Secretary of Defense as well as major tech sites including Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM, according to a report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.